


Why Do You Only Call Me When You're At a Concert?

by EG17



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom, x-men days of future past
Genre: Band, Cherik - Freeform, Concert, M/M, Modern AU, break-up, modern day AU, reunite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 20:56:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2124456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EG17/pseuds/EG17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven drags Charles to a alternative band concert to distract him from his recent breakup, which Charles insists wasn't really that bad and doesn't want to call any attention to it. Raven doesn't seem to get that last part though; before he can blink Charles' phone is up on the stage and the band is singing to Erik.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why Do You Only Call Me When You're At a Concert?

**Author's Note:**

> BASED ON A TRUE STORY. I know I know half of you are like "no" and the other half are "oh my GOD where can I meet Charles Xavier" but really. I was at a concert over the weekend (American Authors, The Script, and then One Republic) and The Script got on stage and they were hilarious. Anyway right before they sang 'Nothing,' they said they were going to try something out, and asked a girl to call her ex. She practically threw her phone up on stage and the guy laughed because he was in the phone as Asshole. BUT I KID YOU NOT when they asked what his name was, she shouted angrily "ERIC." And that's when I knew that this had to be written. It's kind of stupid but I thought the story was funny, so enjoy.

 

                The heinous shrieks of something resembling harmony blasting from the stage emulate the sound of metal scraping on metal more than anything close to actual music, but I try to connect with Raven’s affinity for the atrocity. “Is, uh…this is why they call it heavy metal, yeah?” I shout above the din of boys drooling after girls dressed like they think this concert is Woodstock. I stop a shudder as Raven drags me away from staring at a girl that bears an uncanny resemblance to a hippy.

                I wouldn’t be caught dead in seventies clothes.

                But Raven blazes ahead in her white cropped shirt and tight jeans, blonde hair catching the sunlight just right as it cascades like golden rays behind her, her clumsy and reluctant brother in tow. I stick out like an idiot but she blends in so well I’m afraid that if I blink I’ll lose her, yet another face in the sea of dancing bodies.

                I’d only agreed to come because of, well, The Incident. I’d pushed everyone away for a bit, all of my two friends and one sister, and she’d wanted to help me through it by apparently dragging me to events where the music is hardly music and the air is hardly air, granted the disproportionate ratio of cigarette smoke and alcohol breath to actual oxygen concentration. So I let her, and here I am. She was right that it would distract me from wallowing in self-pity, but more in the holy-shit-I-can-only-think-about-how-bad-it-smells than the wow-I’m-so-over-him.

                Honestly, I think she’s still just into the older gay Oxford brother thing.

                I’m suddenly vaguely aware she’s calling back to me, and I pull her back to my side despite the ache in my arm. She pulls hard. “What?”

                “It’s not heavy metal, you uncultured dumbass. It’s _alternative.”_ And she says it, just like that, _alternative,_ like it’s something sacred a member of the humble peasantry like I wouldn’t know about it.

                “I know what alternate music is, Rav,” I snap as we finally find a gap in the crowd to stand, relatively comfortable. Raven starts to throw down half a cup of beer and I take the opportunity to wrap my hand around her waist and tug her to my side, glaring at the jackasses nodding in her direction, already staggering from inebriation.

                “Alternative music, Charles. Alternative.”

                I shrug, grinning at her, and she smiles back. “God, I get that I’m your sister, but you are one good-looking guy. My friends are still all over you. And so are half the girls here.”

                I look around, hard, for the first time, actually meeting people’s gazes instead of frowning at their dispositions. I’m rather oblivious to wandering eyes as of late. I haven’t been interested since we broke it off.

                “Two years is a long time, you know. It might be a while before I’m over it.” I smirk. “So tell the ladies to get off my heels for a while.”

                She crinkles her nose and snorts. “ _It_. Him, Charles, you’re not over Er—” I punch her in the shoulder and she shuts up, smiling to herself. “And don’t pretend you don’t use my friends fawning over you as a huge ego booster. It’s no fair, really. You can’t be gay and take the best of both worlds.”

                I snatch the cup out of her hand and throw down the last of her beer, even though I despise the taste of it. Perhaps the music becomes more tolerable with intoxication, and the prolific consumption of alcohol isn’t a pandemic but rather a sagacious economic decision on the audience members’ behalves.

                “Don’t tell me how to live my life. Attention is attention, no matter who from.”

                A complete stranger claps me on the shoulder and shouts a “hell yeah!” at me. Raven laughs so hard I can’t tell if it’s beer coming out of her nose or tears coming out of her eyes or an unappealing mix of both but it’s so contagious we’re both doubled over in laughter and though we aren’t drunk I’m sure it looks like it.

                “So is this your band?” I manage after finally swallowing the last of my laughs. We turn to face the stage, catching glimpses through the blinding sunset and layers of bodies swaying in a tacit magical rhythm that even I find myself slowly following. While the music isn’t the solidarity the human condition can find in the face of it is quite beautiful, and I shut my eyes and find myself smiling as the warmth spreads through me, Raven throwing her arms around me, pulling me into the beat.

                And she’s right. I do forget.

                “No,” she says as a quieter ballad settles a soft blanket over the crowd. “They’re just the opening band. The feature band—my favorite—should come on in about fifteen minutes. Let’s work our way down to the front!”

                I grimace, my ephemeral comfort with the situation slipping away. “The crowd, Raven, you know I hate that.”

                She gives me big, sad eyes and in mere moments any sense of self-respect I had for myself is left where we were standing as we head down toward the death pit of entangled human limbs and deafening speakers. We’re given a few moments of peace as the opening band finishes and a veil sweeps over them and they’re left to pack up and the stage crew prepares for the _feature alternative band._ How pretentious.

                “You’ve got that look on your face. You think we’re pretentious. How do you think it sounds when you blab about Beethoven’s forty-seventh concerto? Blagh.”

                “What? I don’t even listen to him, I listen to—“

                “I know, I know. Don’t start ranting on me.” She returns the punch to my shoulder. I let it throb and swerve to avoid a pack of pubescent males roaring with laughter as they teeter around at the front of the stage. I squint up to see up at the screens they have placed around for any sign of the band beginning to play when Raven punches me again.

                “Bloody hell, Raven, one’s quite enough!”

                She looks apologetic and flustered. “Sorry, I just have a question to ask.” I narrow my eyes, edging her on. She fumbles on her words like she didn’t actually have a question. “Um, how’s school?”

                “Oh, so you weren’t listening on the way here. You already asked me that. Pick an adjective. Stressful, loads of work, conversely quite nice.”’ I don’t know why I add the last part but it comes slipping out before I can stop it. “Lonely.”

                Raven’s gaze snaps in my direction and it’s laden with the pity I so entirely despise. I shake her off, staring at the white curtain over the stage and willing it to fall and the band to start blaring their personalized offensively not-musical music.

                Sure, Erik and I weren’t both at Oxford, but I’d met him in London and found out he’d gotten his engineering degree from a smaller college and was working an internship in the city. He lived ten minutes from my dorm.

                So I never had the need to feel lonely.

                But he started to get bored, or maybe annoyed. It was never clear, and of course he’d never open that firmly-pressed thin-lipped mouth to tell me anything, like, “It’s hard for me because you study too much and I never get to see you” or maybe “I’m sorry, I’ve been lying to you, I’ve been going to parties and bars and events without you because I’m sick of waiting around for you.”

                So maybe it was my fault.

                “Stop it, Raven. It’s fine. When will they be on?”

                Raven relents and checks her phone. “It’s been twenty minutes. It should be any minute now, really.” Her careful expression molds onto guarded excitement.

                I smile despite myself and slip my hand into hers, giving it our trademark squeeze. “What? Come on! You—we’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. Are you excited?”

                Apparently she’d been waiting for my permission. A grin splits her face and her eyes gleam with excitement like her long lost mother will be on the stage to accept her with open arms rather than her favorite band.

                “Absolutely! Are you? Just a little bit?” She begs at me with a grin through pinched fingers indicating just that little bit. I bite my lip through my smile, pretending to consider. She tugs my arm down to her side so my face is right next to her and she kisses me on the cheek. I turn and mouth a big ‘no’ at her.

                “Jerk!” she screams as the crowd starts to roar in response to some indication of progress on the stage’s behalf.

                My absolutely witty and brilliant retort is swallowed by the momentum of the crowd as the white curtain falls and the band is revealed. The screens come to life for the first time tonight, revealing the name of _my_ favorite band in its traditional font.

                I’m dumbfounded until I notice Raven’s staring at me, no doubt waiting for a reaction, and my mind is flipping through the past hour and a half that we’ve been wandering around, the way Raven was careful to tug me in each direction, to direct my gaze elsewhere, never letting me focus too long on anyone’s t-shirt or words, never getting any indication as to the band’s name. And I was so stuck in my own head I hadn’t bothered to ask.

                “Raven!” Adrenaline kicks in as the band hits the first chord but I’m left staring at her, and I smile, and it’s not forced. Genuine euphoria spreads through me for the first time in a while. “Raven,” I say loudly, and it sounds much sillier than it’s supposed to. “Thank you. Thank you so much!”

                “Sh! I can’t hear!” she screams back, but I barely hear her.

                I’ve never liked dancing, mostly because the disparity between how I’d like to dance and how I actually do is embarrassing, but by the third song Raven’s making me dance with her so I am, a clumsy tangle of limbs as I spin her around, and end up in an awkward embrace with a drunk girl who’s a bit too thrilled, so Raven and I just go back to our original spot squeezed between what looks like a wrestling team and a middle-aged family in which the parents are questioning their existence as their children scream along to the words.

                I feel the need to add a qualifier. What am I, a sophisticated student at the prestigious Oxford University, doing at a concert in which my favorite band appeals to screaming teenage girls and drunk twenty year old men alike?

                First off, shut up. I can like who I want.

                Secondly, when I say they’re my favorite band, I mean my favorite band as a teenager. You know, the one you’re half-embarrassed about years later but when their song comes on at midnight when you’re driving home you turn it up full volume and belt it out a half-key off? The one that got you through those angsty, teenage years? Yeah, the one you’re thinking about right now. Like you wouldn’t go to their concert right now and love it.

                Plus, they’re a safe band. Not a single song is associated with him.

                After the end of their fourth one, a brand new song that will be released on their new album in a month, which a breathless Raven insists that we buy, there’s a lapse in feedback from the speakers as the lead singer steps up to talk. Raven and I exchange excited remarks about the show so far as the speaker blurts out the usual thanks and elicits proper screams from the crowd.

                I’d been so caught up in the music and pungent fumes of the crowd, I hadn’t appreciated how close we actually are to the stage, but I find myself at eye-level with the eccentrically blue socks of the lead singer, and I gaze up at him.

                “Anyway, I’d like to give something a try this time around,” he says, fighting to catch his breath. The other band members are grinning into their instruments and the crowd leans forward as a collective unit and I’m left evaluating the vices and virtues of a crowd before he moves on slowly, manipulating the crowd like he knows he can. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. So who wants to give it a try?” Before he even finishes his sentence everyone’s screaming affirmations. He nods, smiling, and hits a chord, driving everyone hysterical. “Not to brag, but I think everyone can connect with this next song. We’ve all had someone, whether it be a friend, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, your mom…someone who’s hurt us and who we’ve let bother us for way too long. Who we should now learn to let go, yeah?” Apelike roars from the crowd.

                “So I’m going to need a volunteer, someone to call up an ex-someone, an ex of any kind!”

                I start to chuckle at the idea, looking around for the idiot that’s going to participate when Raven’s claws latch onto my arms as fiercely as her namesake and my heart leaps into my throat. I yell at her through the swarm of arms waving their phones at the stage. “What the hell?”

                As I struggle to pull away, she swoops into my pocket with a sense of the sleight of hand I didn’t know she had and pulls out my phone. I reach for her but one of the wrestlers has decided that he’s got dibs on my sister and I shouldn’t be lunging at her, so he picks me up like I weigh two pounds and plops me down next to him, and I’m left screaming about how she’s my little shit of a sister and how she better get off my phone before she hands that up to the stage, like she’s doing now, and oh God they’re taking my phone, and—

                “Perfect, perfect. For everyone who can’t see, the ex is in the phone as ‘Asshole,’” the lead band member says, chuckling as he winks at Raven. The crowd screeches with laughter and heat rises into my cheeks as I knock the wrestler out of the way with newfound strength and draw up next to Raven’s side, glaring down at her.

                “Get it back,” I hiss. She shakes her head. “Get it back.”

                “No.”

                “Yes.”

                “No.”

                Our pissy sibling fight ends only once the jackass holding my phone waves the crowd down to calm down. “Hey, miss, what’s his name?”

                She shoots me a smug grin, wallowing in her fifteen minutes of fame as the cameras zoom in on her. “Erik,” she calls up, suppressing a fit of giggles.

                “Erik the Asshole,” he echoes, and his name ripples through the crowd with jeers, like the name is bitter on their lips. I’m furious—I never put him in my phone as ‘Asshole,’ that was Raven’s joke. And it wasn’t his fault, it just…didn’t work out.

                “Alright, well I’m going to call Erik up, and you’re all going to help me in singing this kickass goodbye song. Perfect closure, yeah?” Raven gives him a thumbs-up as my heart sinks and all respect for my band dissipates.

                But when he jabs the call button with conviction, waving the phone like a trophy of newfound contempt for a complete and utter stranger, I’m not as livid as I know I should be, not as mortified or upset on behalf of Erik. For a moment I fear because I’m wrong about ever loving him, about having empathy or feelings for him at all.

                I catch Raven’s look out of her eyes, the gleam in them and the smirk tugging up on her face, and maybe that’s why I feel okay when I hear the band member say, “Hey, Erik?” and introduce himself and the band and then asks the crowd to roar a hello. I wince at some of the expletives and hope Erik didn’t hear.

                A small part of me hopes he hasn’t hung up.

                “Rav, you think...” The words catch in my throat. “Think he’s hung up?”

                Raven shakes her head, laughing. “No, no I don’t think he has.” She turns from me back to the stage and she’s got that look on her face like she knows something I don’t.

                But the thought slips away with the sound of a chord slicing through the roar of the crowd, and I can’t help it, Raven and I sing at the top of our lungs, trying to beat out the wrestling team to our right by singing louder. The phone is metonymic of all the exes flitting through people’s minds as the words spill out over us, angsty yet just enough of a profound touch, and the band leader exploits its symbolism, pretending to kiss it sardonically and even going so far as to plant it into his crotch and pretend to screw it. Raven laughs so hard she’s crying and her singing is raw with hysteria but my homosexuality doesn’t extend far enough to enjoy the thought of a sweaty man rubbing his skinny-jeaned emo crotch on my phone.

                The song ends with a bang, everyone left shrieking with the last of their resolve, but the din quickly drops off in anticipation for the end result. My heart pounds in my throat as he makes a big flourish out of drawing the phone up to his ear.

                You could see the glint in his eyes before he opens his mouth. He’s still there. I can hear his voice in my head, his confusion, maybe his laughter, maybe his anger…

                No, he’d be laughing. I’m sure of it. But I check with Raven, just in case.

                “You think he’s laughing?”

                Raven furrows her eyebrows. “Of course he is. You know him, Charles. You’ve said it yourself. It didn’t end ugly. It just…ended. Maybe if either you idiots bothered to talk it out…too late now. He’ll never answer another call from you again.”

                We both chuckle at that as the band leader has us say a big goodbye one last time. “Thank you for that,” I say to Raven, biting down on the sarcasm. She shrugs.

                The concert lasts another hour and a half but my tolerance for crowds does not, so we pick our way through the post-climax music high, dodging beer cans and stray shoes on our way back to the car. We slip in between the narrow parking spaces, Raven sitting shot gun, and I feel like a teenager again, windows down and music blaring through the low, sharp sun, just waiting to figure out the world ahead.

                “That was so stupid,” I finally admit, laughing more to myself than to share in it with Raven, but I see her smiling at me through the corner of my eye, and I can easily mark this down as the happiest I’ve been in a while. Sure, I’m lonely, and I’ve got to go back to studying my ass off tomorrow, but this one day was enough. I hope she knows it.

                “Not the concert. The bloody phone call. I quite enjoyed the concert. Thank you, really.”

                She nods, staring into the side view mirrors as she tucks her unruly hair behind her ear, aviators glaring in the sun. “You’re welcome. I can’t take all the credit.”

                And that’s when my phone starts to ring. I turn down the music. “Who’s that calling? The Rolling Stones? Taylor Swift? What band is going to screech at me through the phone?” I’m laughing but she isn’t, her lip indented with teeth marks.

                “It’s Erik.”

                I almost swerve and drive onto the meridian of the highway. “Oh, shit. He’s probably mad. He’s annoyed that I let that happen. Well, you let that happen. Not my fault. Just press send and then end. That way—”

                “You don’t have to talk, and you don’t get a voicemail. Honey, don’t think you’re the only one who’s got trails of suitors to ignore.”

                I wait for her to do it, but her finger lingers. I pull over and look at her.

                “That’s it, you don’t get it. I’m done with him, and here’s proof. We agreed to be friends but give each other some space. So give it to me and let me send-end him.”

                She shakes her head. “No. Answer it, then, as a friend.”

                I shake my head more vigorously. “Time. We need time.”

                “Time to think about why you’re perfect for each other. Why you should get back.”

                “Oh, god, don’t be a brat. You don’t get it, you’re young. It didn’t work out, okay? Don’t be such a damn know-it-all matchmaker.”

                Her jaw drops as the phone hits its third ring. I know it’s only got a few more.

                “Get off your high horse, Charles. I saw the way you looked at him, and the way he looked at you, and the way you loved each other, better than I’ve ever seen, in anyone. Rose and Jack on the Titanic didn’t have as good a love story.”

                I slam my head back into the headrest. “That’s because he fucking died. Give me the goddamn phone.”

                “No,” she snaps, and we’re doing it again, and suddenly the phone is in my hand, and I’m an idiot because I’m actually considering it, and I’m hating my stupid sister because she’s so right and so wrong.

                And then I think about how she is young, and she is immature, and how could she have coordinated all this, and how she even knew my favorite childhood band, or when  I had school break...I mean we talked, but the girl never let anything stick in that fast-moving head of hers…

                And that way she was smiling like she knew something.

                The phone’s got two more rings before voicemail, and while I know I could let it go, while I know I could call back or never call back or figure it out ten minutes from now or ten years, it seems like it’s now or never, and I think I’m just so riled up from the angst of the band I’m being a drama queen, but then it hits me.

                “You…him…” I blink. “He bought the tickets.”

                She blinks at me, except with one eye open, a wink, that goddamn conspiring clever little shit of a stupid sister—

                _Of course he is. You know him, Charles._

Damn right I do.

                And the moral of the story is, don’t ever let anyone tell you your favorite band is gay, because hell yeah they are—and maybe the post-concert adrenaline rush you get will make you so hyped up on temperamental and idiotic emotions that you will act on convictions you might never had you went to Beethoven’s concert and listened to his non-existent forty-seventh concerto but by God, it just might save your relationship, so in the end, who’s the real, gay winner here?

                It’s me.

                I slam the button with more conviction than Beyonce hitting the high note on her hit single and put the phone up to my ear before her song drowns out the one word in my head that matter right now.

                The ringing stops, and the car falls silent.

                “Hello?”

                Just one beat.

                “Hello. You’ve got better vocal chords than I remembered, Charles.”

                Ironically my words jam in my throat and I’m terrified that, in fact, they’ve never been worse, but the sound of his voice melts my tongue and my beautiful and witty retort comes smoothly off, and my vocal chords don’t fail me after all, because he knows. He always knows.

                “So, was I right? Was that your favorite band? Still like them?”

                He’s trying to say, _Was I right? Do you still care?_

“Yeah, Erik. You…” I answer all the questions at once, all the unspoken and spoken ones. “You’re right.” Goddamn that boy.

                He always is.

               

               

               


End file.
